Category Archives: Speakers

Speaker: David Coveney

davidcoveney David Coveney is what’s called a dinosaur. He started his IT career in the 80s working on mainframe computers and he’s seen the cycles of software technology as we continue to try and make things better through code. After years as an enterprise systems consultant he decided to drop out and get involved in the web. David runs interconnect/it, a WP development firm in Liverpool, UK which is notable for developing The Spectator’s new site, Nottingham University’s many and prolific blogs, building CGIAR’s website as well as lots of other websites that have helped clients cut costs and get on with their work.

In David owns words “I accidentally wrote a useful but dangerous little search/replace script that became crazy popular even though it was one of the smallest bits of work in my career!” That turned out to be a bit of a hit and is downloaded about 200 times a day, every day.

In his spare time he used to race cars, go travelling and ride motorbikes, combining these interests when possible. But now he has two toddlers in his life, so mostly he just goes home and laughs with them whilst otherwise concentrating on building a business.

David talk will be about “Unlocking Enterprise with WordPress”.

WordPress is used by lots of businesses, and it certainly has a space in the enterprise space. In this talk I explore how WordPress is used by business, in particular those in Europe, and show how the services and culture around large scale WordPress have worked beautifully for the US market but have limited the potential of the platform in other marketplaces. I also find the platform’s weaknesses, and illustrate what we could do as a community to make our favourite CMS a better fit for those large, risky projects that seem to end up going to Drupal or, worse, high cost supposedly enterprise grade content management systems.

Speaker: Miriam Schwab

Miriam-webfriendly Miriam started illuminea seven years ago with a computer shoved into the corner of her bedroom. As a completely bootstrapped business, Miriam and illuminea have seen it all: great successes, horrible failures, smooth delivery and projects that choked all along the way. All that while raising four, five, six and now seven kids.

Today, illuminea is one of the leading agencies in Israel focusing on WordPress development. Since running a small business in this field poses endless challenges and opportunities, Miriam will “open source” the lessons learned at illuminea headquarters, with the goal of helping you learn from her mistakes so you don’t have to make them!

We will discuss common issues that can face WordPress service providers, ranging from how to get more clients, pricing, contracts, project management, staying up-to-date, finding other people to hire or work with, marketing, sales, etc.

Speaker: Ptah Dunbar

gravatar-pirate-mugshot Ptah also know as Cap’n Pirate Dunbar is a WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress core contributor and PHP 5.3 Zend Certified Engineer. The Cap’n works with an amazing team at LiveNinja.com, a WebRTC based video PaaS (also powered by WordPress and BuddyPress) for experts to get paid for their know-how. Depending on the season, the Cap’n resides in sunny Miami Beach, FL or in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Europe. He is actively involved in the PHP community supporting local meetup groups and helps co-organize WordCamp Miami annually. You can connect with him on Twitter or Facebook.

At WordCamp Europe he will be talking about “Unit Testing like a Pirate.”

What are unit tests? Why put the effort into writing unit tests? You might say, “Heck, I know my code works because I wrote it, sniff”… Besides, what do sustainable unit tests look like so I don’t have to spend all of my time on them? If this sounds familiar, this talk is for you. You will be introduced to the world of testing, with a focus on testing at the unit level, along with demonstrating practical examples for WordPress plugin development.

Speaker: Scott Basgaard

scott-basgaard Scott Basgaard lives somewhere in the mountains of beautiful Southern Norway. Born and raised in New Jersey, he moved there to live with his wife Renate. He loves all things WordPress and organized the first WordCamp Norway in 2012. Scott makes a living under his alter ego, Scotty B, who is a Support Ninja over at WooThemes specializing in WooCommerce. He’s passionate about helping others and recently organized a 24-hour-long WordPress event, which was free for community, called WordSesh.

Scott will talk about “the importance of delivering happiness to your customers and users”.

In this presentation, I’ll discuss growing and building business through customer service and discuss some tools to use along the way.

I’ll also touch on the importance of helping in the WordPress community as well, as a way of giving back and its value to both you as an individual and whatever team you are a part of.

Q&A With Matt Mullenweg

matt-mullenwegIt’s a pleasure to have the co-founder of WordPress join us for the very first WordCamp Europe. As well as being the co-founder of WordPress, Matt is the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Jetpack, and a principal and founder of Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.

Matt will be doing an hour long question and answer session with the audience. Got a question for him? Now’s your chance to ask. Want to know about the future of WordPress? Want to know what why a specific decision was made? Want to know why 3.6 took so long? Interested in what people are doing with WordPress worldwide? Want to know Matt’s favourite type of BBQ? Bring your questions along and put them to the man himself.

Speaker: Dre Armeda

dreYou must have been living under a Drupal stone if you’re in the WordPress community and haven’t heard of Dre Armeda. The hat-wearing, taco-eating, (actual) ninja, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sucuri Security and joins us all the way from San Diego. Dre is also the host of The DradCast, the WordPress podcast that hosts with partner-in-crime Brad Williams.

He’ll be sharing his knowledge of WordPress security in a presentation called “Real WordPress Security – Kill the Noise!”

Ever wonder if your site, your visitors, or business is safe on the internet? In this session I will show a demo on how quickly your site can be hacked, and your reputation put on the line. I’ll cover various scenarios that can affect your website like Pharma Hack, SEO Poisoning, and malicious redirects. I’ll then aid you by providing some tips to help reduce risk now and forever. Information Security is everyone’s responsibility, and should be a consideration on any web project, beginning to end.

Awesome! And remember to ask Dre to show you his WordPress tattoo.

Speaker: Rocío Valdivia

rocioWe’d like to welcome Rocío Valdivia to WordCamp Europe. Rocío is a developer at the Spanish development and consultancy, Mecus. Along with the rest of the team, she’s a WordPress Consultant, part of the Spanish translation team at GlotPress, organises the WordPress Sevilla meetup and WordCamp. She has extensive experience with WordPress and BuddyPress plugins, themes development and improvement, and is one of the authors of “WordPress para Dummies”, the Spanish version of “WordPress for Dummies”, published November 2012. She’s currently a consultant and a lecturer at conferences and seminars on WordPress and BuddyPress.

In her presentation, Rocío will be sharing a case study of the Spanish WordPress + Multisite installation El Club Express:

I’ll be sharing a WP Multisite + BuddyPress Case Study on a what’s on guide and magazine for cultural events. I’ll highlight a few of the most interesting features, demonstrating the potential that WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress has. I’ll talk about our successes and lessons learned and how you might apply these in a real world context.

Speaker: Brad Williams

brad_williamsWe’d like to welcome Brad Williams as our next WordCamp Europe speaker. Brad is the co-founder of WebDev Studios, a co-host on the DradCast podcast and a published author of Professional WordPress and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. He lives in Philadelphia where he organizes both the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Philly. He is a leading WordPress developer and security expert; he’ll be talking about “Writing Secure WordPress Code.”

…you’ll learn the proper way to write the most secure code in WordPress. Whether you’re a plugin developer or build themes, it’s extremely important to understand how to secure your code from hacks and exploits. Overlooking some very easy to follow techniques can expose your website to the hackers everywhere. WordPress features a number of built-in methods to help make sure your code is safe and secure, and we’ll cover each and everyone in detail.

Speaker: Vitaly Friedman

vitaly_friedmanVitaly Friedman is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the inimitable Smashing Magazine. Based out of Freiburg, Germany, Smashing Magazine is one of the most popular web design magazine out there, featuring high quality articles from the brightest star in web design and development. Vitaly wrangles the whole team, seeking out new authors, attending and speaking at conferences, and by being a beacon in the web design community.

We’re delighted that Vitaly is joining us for his very first WordCamp, where he’ll share his experiences of running one of the most popular blogs around in his presentation “Behind the Scenes at Smashing Magazine“:

Smashing Magazine started in September 2006 as an almost unstyled WordPress-powered blog. Over the course of years, a simple blog evolved into a professional online publication with a thorough editorial process and numerous quality reviews. How did it happen? What lessons were learned along the way? In this talk, I’ll be speaking about the experiences, mistakes and failures of Smashing Magazine and how recovering from them helped make the magazine better, stronger and more successful.

If you want to know what it takes to run a large-scale, multi-author WordPress blog, this is the presentation for you.

 

Speaker: Boone Gorges

booneJoining us from Queens, New York, is one of BuddyPress’ lead developers, the talented Boone Gorges. As well as working on the core BuddyPress project, Boone is a prolific plugin developer, and oversees the Commons in a Box, Anthologize, and Participad projects. Boone is a former academic, and most of his clients are universities and other non-profit institutions. In his spare time, he is a competitive crossword solver, a jazz pianist, and an afficianado of pizza and barbecue.

Boone will be getting technical with BuddyPress in his presentation “Herding Cats with the BuddyPress Activity Component.”

BuddyPress is great for building niche community sites. But, in the hands of the right developer, BP can power much more than just social networks. The Activity component is a prime example of this flexibility. bp-activity provides a rich API for storing, retrieving, and displaying a wide variety of transactional data. BP itself uses this API for tracking events of a social nature – “Boone and John became friends”, “Boone updated his profile”, etc. But bp-activity is flexible enough to store metadata about, say, e-commerce transactions or RSS items. In this way, the Activity stream defines a standardized schema and set of API functions for querying various types of data that may itself be stored in mutually incompatible ways.

This presentation will give developers an overview of the Activity component, including its data schema, the CRUD methods provided by the bp-activity API, and the activity metadata functions. We’ll talk about how any WordPress plugin can support the Activity stream as a progressive enhancement. And we’ll discuss one or two real-life examples of Activity being used in innovative ways.